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irfanview posts

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Freeware, Browsers

New machine installs: the story so far

Way back in January I wrote about my corporate-sanctioned machine, complete with a few pieces of bloatware (sorry kids!). I appreciate the awesome suggestions, although since I need this thing for work purposes, I'm opting to go light and lean whenever possible to begin with. Yes, I realize Microsoft Office is the antithesis of "light and lean" but the suite is required to stay on the machine. For everything else, I want a small footprint.

Case in point: I needed a screenshot app. I chose MWSnap because it was small and unobtrusive, and didn't require an installation. It isn't perfect, but it does the job and I remember using it years ago. Unfortunately, my next series of application downloads wouldn't be so lean.

Note that a collection of applications says a lot about the primary user and what they will be doing day-to-day. A few months ago I ran a Twitter straw poll for TUAW and found a large portion of followers were web designers and developers, judging from the software they were using at that time. My use case is simple: I'm using this machine to test software for DownloadSquad, learn some programming, and take basic screenshots and possibly screen video. So far, I'm almost where I want to be with the base set of applications. To see what I've installed so far, keep reading.

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Filed under: Design, Windows, Freeware

IrfanView 4.20 released, gets a minor facelift

IrfanView 4.20
IrfanView is a light-weight, but powerful Windows tool for viewing and editing pictures. Version 4.20 is out, and it has a slightly new design, a bunch of bug fixes, and some new features.

At its heart, IrfanView is an image viewer with some editing functions thrown in for good measure. Nobody will mistake it for PhotoShop anytime soon. But you'd be surprised just how much you can do with this free utility.

First of all, IrfanView can handle pretty much any image file type you throw at it. But second, it includes a ton of basic options for editing images, including cropping, resizing, rotating, and applying effects like sharpen, blur, and red eye reduction. Version 4.20 includes a ton of updates, including improved relative zoom, an "auto crop borders" feature which removes outside lines of the same color, and a shiny new icon set.

Filed under: Design, Freeware

IrfanView 4.10: simple image editor gets even better

IrfanView 4.10
You don't need a tank to drive down the street. And sometimes you don't need Photoshop to edit a photo. IrfanView is one of our favorite light weight image viewing/editing applications. Need to open an image, view a slideshow? Check. Want to crop, resize, pixelize, blur, or brighten a photo? Check.

This week IrfanView released version 4.10. The latest update includes support for even more file types and comes packed with new editing features:
  • New paint plugin that lets you draw lines, circles and boxes on an image (just hit F12 to bring up the paint menu)
  • Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF files
  • Lossless JPG Crop added
  • Support for FLV files
  • Auto adjust colors on selected portions of an image
  • A bunch of other bug fixes, tweaks, and new features for editing, opening, and viewing images and multimedia files.
And best of all, you can open and close IrfanView a few dozen times in the amount of time it would take you to load Photoshop. Oh yeah, and it's free. That's nice too.

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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